Alan Turing & A Place to Bury Strangers links for 2008-11-11

Alan Turing (1912-1954) never described himself as a philosopher, but his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” is one of the most frequently cited in modern philosophical literature. It gave a fresh approach to the traditional mind-body problem, by relating it to the mathematical concept of computability he himself had introduced in his 1936-7 paper “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” His work can be regarded as the foundation of computer science and of the artificial intelligence program.

For what this eccentric young Cambridge don did was to dream up an imaginary machine — a fairly simple typewriter-like contraption capable somehow of scanning, or reading, instructions encoded on a tape of theoretically infinite length. As the scanner moved from one square of the tape to the next — responding to the sequential commands and modifying its mechanical response if so ordered — the output of such a process, Turing demonstrated, could replicate logical human thought.

The documents that form the historical record of the development of computing are scattered throughout various archives, libraries and museums around the world. Until now, to study these documents required a knowledge of where to look, and a fistful of air tickets. This Virtual Archive contains digital facsimiles of the documents. The Archive places the history of computing, as told by the original documents, onto your own computer screen.

In the two years it’s been operating, the Daytrotter Sessions, as it’s formally called, has built itself a massive and extraordinary library of exclusive performances from artists such as Vampire Weekend, A Place to Bury Strangers, the Walkmen, Tokyo Police Club, Okkervil River, Spoon, Times New Viking and hundreds more.